Honourable Mention in the Historical Fiction Club Awards for Novice Threads!

Hello!

It's difficult to believe that it's already the 9th of January 2025. It's very remiss of me but I'm only now posting news about another award that Novice Threads received at the very end of 2024.

The Historical Fiction Company posts the main annual award recipients on the 31st December and the Book of the Year winner on January 1st. It's an incredibly busy time to discover, with absolute delight, that you've received an award. As soon as the award was brought to my attention, I managed to post on other Social Media outlets, thought I had posted here too, but clearly not.

I'm therefore totally over the moon to be able to display yet another award for Book 1 of my Silver Sampler Series. All of the awards make my new social media posts a much more attractive proposition (in my opinion)! 

So...

Gold: 

Silver: 

Honourable Mention:

Aren't they beautiful? I love them. :-) 

Slainthe!

Gold and Silver for Novice Threads at the Coffee Pot Book Club Awards!

Good Morning!

It's Sunday 15th December 2024 and last night I found out that Novice Threads, Book 1 of my Silver Sampler Series, published in May 2020, had won two medals in The Coffee Pot Book Club Awards 2024.

One of the finest things about me entering a book competition is that once entered I tend to forget all about the entry and then the surprise is so huge when I find that my novel has been placed, or won an award! 

That's exactly what happened last night. I noticed a friend in Seattle had posted to Instagram that her book had won an award in the Coffee Pot Book Club Awards 2024 and it prompted me to go searching. To my absolute delight, I discovered that NOVICE THREADS had won a GOLD MEDAL in the Historical Women's Fiction Category and a SILVER MEDAL in the Enlightenment (1600s - 1800s) category.

The books in the competition are absolutely wonderful novels, some of which I've already read and others are still on my TBR pile on my always full Kindle. 

My thanks go top the team at The Coffee Pot Book Club for the time, effort, and expertise it takes to make the selections and to present the awards.

Now to get on with that writing of Books 2 & 3 of the Silver Sampler Series. 

Slainte! 

Prince Albert Memorial Museum Exeter

 Happy Thursday Greetings to you! 

A few weeks ago, I paid a very quick visit to the Prince Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter before I headed south to the Historical Novel Society Conference in Devon. 

pugio scabbard 

I was mostly interested in any Roman artefacts in their collections but found them quite limited. When speaking to a museum attendant, she told me there have been few remains uncovered from the Roman era to date around Exeter, and only some very messy digging under Exeter Cathedral might be the answer to increasing their artefact count. Exeter is like many cities in England where the Romans created forts or fortresses and subsequent peoples chose to use the same site on which to build their earliest Christian churches.

Over time, those early churches were replaced and some of them ended up being the most impressive Medieval buildings (architecturally speaking). There will be Roman remains to be found under Exeter Cathedral, undoubtedly, but it's unlikely any will ever be dug up to add to the museum collections since attitudes to how acquisitions are made have changed so much over the centuries.

Strigil

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The strigil above actually came from a Kent find, but is displayed in the museum to show the visitor what one would have looked like. [Some fragments of iron and copper strigils were found in Exeter but not sufficient to put together a complete sample.] The cleansing process of adding oil to the body, then scraping it back off again - along with the dirt and debris accumulated on the skin  - is easy to imagine when admiring the strigil above.

I found some of the non-Roman collections fascinating, the Devon lace in particular. It is so intricately done.

Devon lace

It was a short visit but worth seeing. 

Slainte!